What’s The Best Way To Maintain Your Weight Loss?

Anyone Can Lose Weight. Here’s how to keep it off.

Written by: Jonathan Fletcher

Have you ever lost weight only to regain it once the diet ends?

If you have, you’re normal. In fact, 95% of people who lose a significant amount of weight regain it and more within 5 years.

This is why we don’t teach our clients to diet. Instead, we walk them through our 5-Step Nutrition Freedom Framework, to ensure the weight they lose is gone for good.

But even if you don’t hire us for help, you can learn from copying other folks who have lost the weight and kept it off.

The truth is that success leaves clues. If we pay attention, the strategies that work for those who seemingly stay fit without effort can become the recipe for your own success.

But there’s an important disclaimer here: Be careful who you copy.

Success in health and fitness is a long-term play. Anyone can follow a restrictive diet for 75 days and see impressive results. Most people can lose 10 pounds in a month by avoiding cake, cookies, chips, crackers, pizza, and alcohol. We look at these people and we’re tempted to copy them. After all, it’s working, right?

Wrong. Copying these short-term, unsustainable tactics is a mistake. In 95% of cases the results evaporate once the restrictive protocol is abandoned.

Lose it fast, gain it back fast.

Instead, you want results that last. To do this, you need to zoom out and study the outliers—those who transformed their health and fitness 10 years ago and still maintain or even improve upon those results.

Even though there isn’t one exact recipe for success, there are enough commonalities among these long-term success stories to piece together a solid blueprint.

Grab your #2 pencil and let’s go.

HOW TO MAINTAIN WEIGHT LOSS

Clue #1: Create an Environment That Supports Your Goals

Stop making every decision so difficult. Don’t set traps for yourself and then expend all your willpower trying to avoid them. Buy workout equipment for your home to make consistency easier.

Stop bringing ice cream into the house so you won’t have that internal battle at the end every stressful day.

Watch Seinfeld reruns at night instead of the British Baking Show or Diners Drive-ins and Dives.

People who get in and stay in shape make maintaining their results easier by gradually crafting an environment that supports the healthy life they’re leading. 

It just makes sense, right?

For the next 4 clues, we’re going to the National Weight Control Registry. 

It’s a database of people who have lost an average of 66 pounds and have kept it off for an average of five and a half years. 

This is a much better class of people to copy than our neighbor who’s always gaining and losing the same 30 pounds every year. 

Ok, the first clue from these successful folks. 

Clue #2 They eat breakfast every day. 78% of them to be exact. 

Have you ever thought that skipping breakfast was one of the secrets to losing weight? Yeah, me too.

It’s not. 

A solid, repeatable, high-quality, high-protein breakfast is a foundational habit of people who stay in shape.

Ok, next on the list of things you can copy:

Clue #3 - Self-monitor

People who lose weight and keep it off, check in on themselves. 

More specifically, they weigh themselves at least once a week. 

Because your daily weight fluctuates based on sleep, water retention, how hard you exercised, and undigested food in your stomach,  I’d recommend weighing yourself multiple times per week and tracking the average.

This idea of checking in on yourself makes sense.  

If you’re trying to dial in your budget, you look at your online banking to see where you’re at.

If you’re trying to get stronger, you track how much weight you’re lifting. 

Monitoring gives you the chance to modify things before you dig yourself into a hole. 

Make it a habit to weigh yourself often. You can grab the scale we recommend in on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3x30jE1

Ok, let’s keep copying…

Here’s one you might not want to hear. 

Clue # 4 - Limit Screen Time

62% of the people in the Weight Control Registry who have lost weight and kept it off watch less than 10 hours of TV per week. 

That’s only 2 episodes of Only Murders in the Building or 1 episode of American Idol!

As of the first quarter of 2021, the average American watches over 38 hours of TV per week. You heard that right. 

Almost as many hours watching TV, as working a full-time job.

We aren’t “too busy’, we just waste too much time behind our screens.

Successful people trade their TV time for more productive tasks. Plus they’re ready to go to sleep every night since their environment supports them getting up early to get their workout in.

See what I did there?

Ok, the last thing you copy from the successful folks in the National Weight Control Registry…

Clue #5- Exercise Daily

On average, they exercise about an hour per day. 

I know, I know. You don’t have an hour to exercise every day!

How about 45 minutes? 30? 

Let’s go back to thing number one to copy. Setting your environment up for success.

How much more consistent would you be with getting your workouts done if you had already invested in a home gym, and a plan to follow?

If you’re anything like our clients who work out at home, the answer is a lot more consistent. 

Wanna be more successful in your health and fitness journey? Copy the people who make regular exercise a daily priority instead of an afterthought. 

Oh yeah, find something you enjoy too. You’ll magically find more time to do it. 

Better yet, take advantage of a free trial with us, and find out why our clients are so consistent.

Let’s recap the 5 things that people who stay in shape do so we can copy away:

1: They create an environment that makes good choices easy, and bad choices hard

2: They eat breakfast every day

3: The self-monitor instead of sticking their head in the sand

4: They trade screen time for real self-care

5: They hit the gym, go for a walk, or get some form of exercise for about an hour every day.

So, which one do you need the most work on? 

Breakfast? The sweets you keep bringing into the house? All 5 on the list?

Pick one, not all of them, and start there. 

Keep working on it until you’ve mastered it.

Then move on to the next one.

Give yourself grace when you slip up, but call yourself out when you’re making excuses. 

And most importantly, keep going. 

Have a great day, and as always… Lift heavy, and be nice.

Jonathan

P.S. - If you like this kind of content, scroll back up to the top of the page and follow us Instagram and YouTube.